Saturday, June 21, 2014

Big Sur & Hearst Castle

If you've never had a chance to drive down the 1 in California, then I *highly* recommend it. You'll get some of the prettiest coastal views that you've ever seen! The whole drive down we were freaking out at how beautiful it all is. There's seriously a lookout place to pull over every mile of the way down, that's how much there is to see.

Plus, there's lot's of little hikes you can do along the way, so we took our time driving down and stopped to do a few. My favorite stop was to see McWay Falls. It's so pretty how the waterfall hits the beach like that! Dallin and I were trying to figure out how to get down there (since people clearly had been on that beach before, there were writings and footprints in the sand). But, sadly we couldn't find how to get there (must have been by boat).

This is the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur, which is considered kind of an icon for this drive.

We also stopped to do a little hike down to the water area (and saw a huge snake while we were walking on the way down!!).

The next morning we FINALLY got to see Hearst Castle. This has been on my bucket list the whole time we've lived in California. I'm obsessed with castles and mansions, and this one was awesome.

Too bad the pool wasn't filled, but can you imagine swimming in that thing? How fun!

One of my favorite parts about touring castles/mansion is learning about the people who built and lived in them. I love hearing their life stories because they are always fascinating. We asked how much money William Hearst spent to build his castle, but no tour guide could give a straight answer (someone finally said maybe around 8 million back in that day?). We did learn a little about Mr. Hearst though and it was not what I was expecting: He got kicked out of Harvard because he put a donkey in the dean's office! Sounds like he was quite the wild boy ha! But, then he did grow a newspaper business his father gave him into a huge company.

We took a tour to see the inside of the mansion and the movie theatre room was our favorite. They showed home movies from when he lived here and it was fun to see the parties he threw back in the day. All of the famous hollywood actors and actresses, athletes, and singers would come to his parties. There was tons of dancing and swimming, and even really cool animals. He used to have like a zoo in his yard (even polar bears and zebras used to be here!). Dallin and I wished we could have been to one of his parties back in the day;)

Lastly, we saw the indoor pool. Check out that gold diving board!

We also stopped in Carmel and had dinner at a delicious restaurant called Casanovas.